Free Magnus by Sylvie Germain

give, and finally what he will decide to do after this encounter. She has suggested he come and live in San Francisco, but without daring to be too insistent.

    The evening of his return to the Schmalkers, Magnus questions Lothar.
    ‘Why did you convince me I was your nephew, and so the son of those people who inflicted themselves on me? Why keep me deceived? Why lie to me all that time?’
    Lothar could deny everything. He could feign incomprehension in the face of the accusatory questions of the young man who insists on being called Magnus from now on. He could hide behind the fact he had broken off all contact with his sister at the time the child must have been born, that he was living in exile when she adopted him, if indeed this were the case. He could pretend to know nothing, or put his accuser in the dock instead, by asking him where he gets this sudden conviction he is not the son of Thea and Clemens Dunkeltal? Who has told him this alleged secret? What proof does he have? But Lothar does not do this. He does not want to. The moment he had been expecting, but was constantly putting off as he so dreaded it, all of a sudden has arrived. The moment to admit finally to a lie perpetuated by inordinate discretion.

    Yes, he knew. He had known for a long time his sister was barren, and no fertility treatment had been able to reverse this. Her younger brothers had taken the place of sons. It was after their death that the idea of adopting a child had developed, become an obsession with her. When the opportunity presented itself she seized it, for the first time ever defying her husband, who had no desire whatsoever to take in any foundling, and felt all the more reluctant to do so having just fathered a son, illegitimate admittedly but nonetheless his. To what extent Thea was aware of Clemens’ infidelity, Lothar could not tell. She had always expended so much energy in denying anything that might upset her, interfere with her exalted vision of the world, she might have deliberately closed her eyes to that as well.
    But the story of this adoption, explains Lothar, he only heard about later when his sister after some fifteen years’ silence wrote asking him to come to Friedrichshafen. She knew she had not much longer to live, and she was concerned about her son. For despite everything, she thought of him as her son and she had loved him. But she had no one to whom she could entrust this child; her close family were dead, her friends had gone their separate ways, and she had managed to isolate herself completely. Then she remembered her elder brother, the brother she had insulted when he opposed the regime, whom she had despised when he married a young woman of Jewish origin, then regarded as a traitor when he emigrated to an enemy country. But it was not only because she had no one else to turn to that she appealed to him, but because she had no doubt he would respond to her appeal. That he would respond immediately, and would undertake without fail the mission she wanted him to accomplish. Her animosity towards Lothar notwithstanding, her trust in him remained intact, and as death neared, it came to the fore again. Whether or not the child should be told the truth, she left it up to Lothar to decide. Even this lie, which after all she had meticulously and doggedly constructed, a lie she had jealously protected, was something she no longer cared about. She no longer cared about anything, had lost the will to fight, the desire to live, the strength to love or hate. She had no expectations, of either forgiveness or pity from anyone, no hopes whatsoever, she believed in nothing. She had plumbed the depths of despair and was preparing to die in a state of total indifference towards herself. Passing into nothingness, that was all. Only the future of this adoptive son, of whose origins she knew nothing except that he had survived the bombing of a city, still mattered to her, and only the brother she had violently rejected seemed